The Man Who Murdered God (7 page)

“Bernie's a grown man. He'll get over it.”

“You really miss Ollie that much?”

He looked at her again. Grey eyes. Nice eyes. “What the hell makes you think I miss him at all?” he asked.

“Couldn't you use him right now? Aren't you asking yourself how Ollie would handle it?”

“I'm not asking anybody anything. I'm telling myself how
I'm
going to handle it.”

“You know, you used to be a nice guy.”

“I still am. This is as nice as it gets.” McGuire let himself smile a little. “You heading home?” he asked.

She nodded and stood up. “I could be persuaded to stop off for a drink on the way if you promise to let the old Joe McGuire come out and play for a while.”

“Some other time,” McGuire said. “See you in the morning.”

He listened to her footsteps echo down the hall before reaching for the telephone. He started to dial, stopped and stared at the ceiling, then hung up and dialled again. After two rings a woman's voice answered, and McGuire introduced himself, said yes, he was fine, yes, he was assigned to the priest murders, and then she told him Ollie wasn't home—went out last weekend and bought himself an aluminum boat and a trailer and drove it up to New Brunswick for some salmon fishing. Hired a guide and all, and she didn't expect to hear from him for another week.

McGuire promised to drop in and visit sometime after Ollie returned. He hung up and stared at the map and the two pins again.

If Harvey Jaycock could finish buffing the ground floor hallway by seven, he would be out of St. Matthew's Catholic School for Boys with lots of time to get to the Braintree Bowling Palace and the United Custodian's league tournament.

Harvey lived for bowling. He had a wife and two adolescent kids and a decent dog in Quincy, all of them housed in the bottom half of a frame duplex. He had over fifteen years of work as janitor at St. Matthew's behind him. And he had a custom-made Strikemaster bowling ball in a shaped fiberglass case, locked in the trunk of his eight-year-old Chevrolet out in the parking lot, and visions of perfect strikes and cross-alley take-outs in his mind.

Harvey's family would sometimes visit the bowling palace to watch him at work on the alleys. “If you come, you gotta sit in the back,” he would tell them sternly. “You don't talk to me before the game starts, and you give me ten minutes to wind down after it's over. You hear? I'm pumped full of adrenalin, that's what I'm tellin' you. Take me that long to come down. See, even the other guys on my team, they give me the room I need.”

It was true. During the game Harvey's teammates rarely spoke to him except to offer an “Attaboy!” or “You was robbed, Harv!” depending on the effect of Harvey's Strikemaster rolling down the alley like drifting thunder.

But it wasn't Harvey's adrenalin level that prevented his teammates from drawing closer. It was Harvey's personality. “Basically, the guy's a prick,” is the way other members described him. “Only reason we keep him around is because he's as reliable as clockwork and he's got a two fifty-five average.”

Harvey was thinking about his Strikemaster while buffing the lower hallway floor of St. Matthew's and worrying about the wisdom of using a brand-new bowling glove on this, the first night of the league tournament. Maybe he should have kept his old glove. It was well broken-in. New gloves are stiff, it takes eight, nine games until they give you the feel of the ball. . . .

“Evening, Harvey.”

Oh shit, Harvey thought. It's Sellinger. What the hell's he doing in here so late? “Evening, Father,” Harvey answered pleasantly. He smiled and nodded his head, half agreeable gesture, half genuflect.

“Just cleaning up some test papers for tomorrow, Harvey,” Sellinger said in answer to Harvey's thoughts. “Shouldn't take more than an hour. Had a diocese dinner over at the Howard Johnson's tonight. Couldn't finish all the work.”

Father David Sellinger, a Jesuit, taught grade six at St. Matthew's Catholic School. His round Irish face shone pink beneath a sharply receding hairline. In college David Sellinger had been a first-string offensive guard on the Loyola varsity football team. Now he wore his weight like a heavy cloak, his rounded shoulders and barrel chest gliding smoothly into a corpulent stomach barely restrained beneath his dark vestments. Only his fiery disposition remained from those athletic days. Father Sellinger's classes were the best-disciplined of any at St. Matthew's. “You don't mess around under Sellinger's nose,” he would tell his students on the first day of each semester. “Understand that from the beginning, and we'll all get along fine. If you don't get the message, I'm going to get some exercise in my right arm, and you're going to feel it on all four cheeks. Front and back.”

Harvey Jaycock knew he could trust Father Sellinger to lock up. But that wasn't right. Harvey was the custodian, damn it. If any of the teaching staff with keys wanted to enter the school at night after he had locked up, well, that was up to them. But Harvey knew he wouldn't sleep well unless he returned to St. Matthew's after bowling and checked all the locks for himself. And if he had to do
that
,
then Harvey would be thinking about it all through bowling. It would occupy part of his mind. It would take the edge off his concentration.

Damn it. Why tonight of all nights?

But Harvey said “Sure thing, Father Sellinger,” and looked down again at the electric buffer swinging back and forth across the polished surface of the marble floor.

Damn it all to hell.

Twenty minutes later Harvey had finished his work. He wheeled the machine into the storage closet and checked his watch. Quarter to seven. He'd hang around until seven, then go up and kind of prod Sellinger, explain how important tonight was to him, how he was responsible for locking up. Maybe Sellinger would understand. He was a tough bastard, but he was human after all. He'd know how important a thing like a bowling tournament could be to a man.

Harvey had fifteen minutes to kill. He smiled a little. His tongue emerged and wetted his lips. He'd look at the magazine he bought in the Combat Zone last week. That magazine and others like it may have been the salvation of Harvey's marriage. He would look at the pictures alone in the basement of St. Matthew's, all those beautiful young girls and the things they did with those lucky young guys, some of them black. Harvey didn't like seeing the black guys doing it to those pretty white girls.

He would look at the magazines during the day, and at night he would remember the pictures when he was in bed with his overweight wife, whose breasts were like deflated balloons. It helped, Harvey believed. Without the fantasies of the pictures he and his wife would probably have no sex life at all. Take away all those dirty magazines, and you'd have a hell of a lot more screwing around, frustrated husbands and wives, divorces, all that stuff. Of course, people like Sellinger and the others would never understand it. That's why he kept the magazine hidden in the furnace room, behind the repair manuals.

He entered the furnace room, switched on the light, reached up to the top shelf and withdrew the magazine, its front cover a colour photograph of a young man reclining on a couch while being serviced by two blond women. Harvey walked back towards the custodian's room, flipping through the pages as he went.

What the hell was that? Sounded like the back door closing. Sellinger must have finished and left already.

Harvey turned to a photo story of the young schoolgirl who welcomes the two television repairmen into her home while her parents are out. Harvey liked that one. The story began with the girl in pigtails, wearing a short skirt and knee socks. The two young repairmen fixed the television and lay down in front of it with her. On the next page they had her clothes off. Harvey's hands shook as he looked at the sequence of pictures. He fumbled with the magazine as he turned to the next page, where—

Footsteps. Damn it, Sellinger's still here. Or somebody else is, another teacher maybe. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don't they know how late it is? Can't they get their work done in the daytime, like everybody else?

He could hear the footsteps moving along the hall. Harvey hoped whoever it was had wiped his feet at least. A whole hour it had taken to buff and polish that hallway.

The sound of the gunshot slammed its way through the school and down the stairs to where Harvey Jaycock was suddenly frozen in place. He stood wide-eyed, unbelieving. Then, rising in volume and pitch like a living thing, a wail, a cry to heaven and to hell, he heard the scream. It was a whine of terror and pain, cut off by another explosive sound that echoed through the halls to the basement of St. Matthew's Catholic School for Boys.

“Oh sweet Mary, save me,” Harvey whispered aloud. He stood in place, unable to decide whether to mount the stairs in front of him or to work his way through the basement to the other end of the school, climb the stairs there, leave by the side entrance—

There was no noise. No footsteps in the hall above him. The rear stairs—they were best. A quick sprint down the hall, and he would be gone. Harvey turned and moved as discreetly as his overweight body could manage, past the furnace room, the electrical room, the mechanical pump-room, to the rear stairs. He paused at the bottom, hearing only his heart beating, only his breath in staccato rhythm.

He began climbing the stairs.

“You're early, Joe. That's nice.”

She was sitting upright, her pillows propped behind her. Her make-up had been neatly applied, her hair tied back in a pink ribbon. But nothing could camouflage the tension that began somewhere behind her eyes and extended across each line in her face.

McGuire sat beside her, closer than on his earlier visits. “I gotta tell you,” he said. “Today I looked forward to this visit. It's kind of nice to talk to somebody who isn't second-guessing me.”

She crossed her hands in her lap and forced a smile. “Are they getting to you?” she asked. “You said you would never let them get to you. You said you'd go back to Worcester and drive a cab before you would let them get to you.”

He smiled back at her. “You remember that, do you? Funny. Just last night I was thinking of Gordie Scambati and me talking about that. Getting our own cab business in Worcester, maybe running limousines into Boston or something. I saw Gordie's picture in that box you gave me. Remember Scooter Scambati?”

Her eyes were shining. The lines had softened. “I remember him,” she said. “I remember them all. Talk to me about them, Joe. It'll do you good.”

And they talked of old friends and the past, because McGuire knew it would help Gloria even more than it would help him.

Harvey was at the top of the stairs. Ahead of him, at the end of the hallway, he could see the rear door. Beyond it was the parking lot where Harvey's Chevrolet and custom-made Strikemaster waited. Just get down the damn hall, Harvey told himself. Past the stairwell and down the hall and out the damn door and get the cops, get somebody here, just get the hell out.

He moved at a fast walk, approaching the stairwell. Keeping his eyes moving. Listening for sounds. Watching for—

Jesus Christ!

He was there on the stairs, not ten feet away. A kid with a shotgun. A short, black, pump gun held at the kid's waist, aiming at his gut. Oh Mary, Mother of God. Oh Jesus.

Harvey broke into a run, but the stairwell was open on that side, and the kid, Harvey knew, had a clear shot all the way down the hall. There was a doorway on the inside wall. Harvey skidded to a stop, seized the knob, swung the door open and stepped inside.

A broom closet. Of all the damn doors in St. Matthew's, he had to step into a broom closet. He's gonna blow me apart, Harvey whimpered to himself. There's no inside lock on this door, the damn door is only two layers of eighth-inch plywood, hollow in between. He doesn't even have to open the fucking door. He just aims and shoots, and I'm hamburger. Harvey crouched down, his heavy hands holding the doorknob, hearing the footsteps approach.

She was laughing aloud, her head back and her eyes closed. “You were in the attic,” she said. “We could never figure out how you got in the attic, as drunk as you were.”

McGuire laughed with her. “Hell, I can't remember either. I just remember making those stupid noises and looking down at you guys, you and Carole and Phil and Scooter and Scooter's girl, what was her name? Anyway, you all thought the place was haunted. I remember Scooter yelling ‘This is the last time I come to Maine! This is the last time I come to Maine!'”

“Lyn,” she said, a hand wiping the tears from her eyes. “I remember her name was Lyn. Pretty girl.”

“And then I tried to walk back through the attic, away from the trapdoor, and put my foot right through the ceiling!”

They laughed again and talked about the car that wouldn't start and the beach they discovered the following day. Breathing life into a Maine weekend enjoyed a quarter century ago.

Harvey heard the footsteps approaching, the sneakers scuffing along his polished marble floor. “Oh God,” he whispered, “save me from this one, save me now and I'll do penance, I'll take the family to Rome and we'll walk through St. Peter's Square on our knees, I'll light a candle every morning the rest of my life, I swear. . . .”

The footsteps stopped outside the closet door, a foot away from Harvey, who crouched there in the darkness, squeezing his eyes shut.

He heard the sound of . . . what? Paper being torn. It's my magazine, he realized. In his panic to enter the closet he had tossed the magazine aside. Now it was being shredded two feet beyond the closet door. He's tearing up my magazine, Harvey realized.

The footsteps receded until the heavy outer door at the end of the hall slammed closed. Harvey whimpered slightly and leaned against the door frame, his breath escaping in long, deep sobs.

Only when he stood up did he realize he had soiled himself.

“You have to, Joe. You said you would.”

The tension had returned to her eyes. McGuire heard the nurse coming down the hall with Gloria's evening injection.

“Gloria, I'm not good at this.”

“Neither am I,” she said. “But I told you. It's all I've got to plan now. Please. I'll tell you what I want, and you can make the arrangements. I know you're busy, but it shouldn't take long.”

“It's not the time, for Christ's sake,” he said. He looked up to see her watching him. He could feel the nurse's eyes on him, standing at the door. What the hell, it's the least he could do. “Okay. You're right. You want the chapel service, you want the champagne for the nurses. . . .”

“Lieutenant McGuire?”

He turned to face the nurse.

“You're wanted on the telephone,” she said. “It's a man named Lipson. He says it's very urgent.”

McGuire looked at Gloria. She closed her eyes and nodded. He brushed past the nurse to the end of the hall, where a wall telephone waited, its receiver off the hook.

“Yeah?” he barked into it.

“We've got another one,” Bernie said on the other end of the line. “In Braintree. I've got a car on its way to you. It'll be at the emergency entrance.”

“Okay,” McGuire answered, “I'll go right down.”

“Joe?”

“What?”

“This one's different. This time he left us a message.”